The Internet provides access to a wide variety of information. For example, digital image files, video and/or audio files, as well as web page resources for particular subjects or particular news articles, are accessible over the Internet. With respect to web page resources, many of these resources are designed to facilitate the performing of particular functions, such as banking, booking hotel reservations, shopping, etc., or to provide structured information, such as on-line encyclopedias, movie databases, etc.
A variety of search engines are available for identifying particular resources accessible over the Internet. These search engines crawl and index the various web page resources. The search engine then uses the index to determine which resources are most responsive to a search query and provides search results that link to the resources in response to the query.
With the advent of tablet computers and smart phones, native applications that facilitate the performance of the same functions facilitated by the use of web page resources are now being provided in large numbers. So too are native applications that provide virtual experiences—such as rich, interactive, three-dimensional experiences; graphical based applications in which there is little textual data; and so on. Many of the native applications that provide virtual experiences do not include native application pages from which data that can be indexed can be extracted by a search engine. Instead, metadata from other sources external to the native application and regarding the native application are indexed and then accessed when processing search queries.